Chaucer and Italian Textuality (review)

This study reconstructs what Chaucer’s Italian “library” may have looked like, in order to suggest the reverberations of Italian textuality in his writings and to redirect source study to texts as they were actually available, with marginal spaces filled with glosses, illustrations, and catchwords. Focusing on Boccaccio, his readers, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Clerk’s Tale in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, Clarke stresses Chaucer as a reader of Italian textuality and an author of the “whole page.” Methodologically, the study seeks to use variable manuscript witnesses not only to infer instances of reception but also to reclaim the aim of Lachmannian textual studies: reconstructing the author.

Two chapters concern forms of Italian textuality that may have shaped Chaucer’s reading of classical works. Chapter 1 suggests an Italian Ovidian tradition behind The Legend of Good Women; the Florentine notary Filippo Ceffi’s translation of the Heroides exemplifies the different kind of Ovid available in Italy. Chapter 2 treats Boccaccio not as an author of texts but as a producer of books. He copied and annotated not only his own works, like the Teseida, but also works by others, especially Dante, and the textuality of his autographs provides models for the negotiation of text and margin that Chaucer may have experienced in his reception of Statius as well.

Chapter 3 initiates the study’s main focus, how the textuality of the Decameron shaped the experience of its early readers, including Chaucer. Boccaccio exercised considerable control over the textual and material construction of his books. Four early copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron produced by and for Florentine mercantile readers serve as models of Chaucer’s encounter with this work. It sometimes circulated in fragmentary forms, as exemplifed by the oldest witness, which Clarke (following Marco Cursi) associates with the Buondelmonti banking family and thus the political-financial networks associating Florence and Naples. In addition, he argues, two other manuscripts promote reading practices that arise from their physical structure. Thus the illustrated catchwords of the autograph Hamilton 90 (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek preussischer Kulturbesitz) work to prompt an active, forward-and-backward thematic reading; they bridge “a physical gap by proleptically recalling” words the reader has not yet read. Attributed to Boccaccio himself, the catchwords are so imbricated that they “are incarnations of the text rather than parallel figures who interact with it” (101, 102). The Capponi codex illustrations visually inscribe both Boccaccio as author and a female audience vulnerable to the erotic potential of the book, whose cognomen (drawn from Inferno V’s allusion to Lancelot and Guinevere) is “prencipe galeotto” (104). Sadly, no reproductions from either manuscript are included, making the argument more difficult to follow.

From the beginning, the story of Griselda has prompted accounts of readerly reception; Petrarch, for example, supplemented his Latin translation with an account of two readers, one moved to tears, the other disbelieving. The high point of Chapter 3 is a detailed examination of Decameron X.10 in the Mannelli codex, whose sometimes idiosyncratic glosses (reproduced in Appendix 1) record the responses of an early “copista per passione”—an amateur reader of a mercantile family. Clarke does not claim the Mannelli codex as a source for Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, but rather adduces it as a contemporaneous context for reading the Decameron in 1384 (113). Mannelli’s glosses show remarkable emotional engagement (Gualtieri is “pazzo,” crazy). Most striking is Griselda’s imagined marginal response when her silent submission becomes too much to bear: “ ‘Pisciarti in mano Gualtieri! Chi mi ristora di dodici anni? Le forche?’ (f. 170rb), ‘Go piss on your hand Gualtieri! Who’ll give me back twelve years? The gallows?’ ” (122). The Mannelli codex exemplifes the “varied textuality” (128) of Chaucer’s contact with Italian vernacular and Latin sources. In a recurrent gesture linking Boccaccio’s own bookmaking to that of his early readers, Clarke suggests that these texts exposed Chaucer to “a complex mode of authorial self-presentation” (128). Clarke’s conception of Boccaccio’s practice of...